> The beans are the most important part - you should get them roasted within the last few weeks.
That's the key. When I buy mid-range beans (usually what I do—the good stuff's expensive) my pourovers are really just manual drip coffee. Fine, but just... coffee. When I use really good beans, though? It's a whole different drink. All kinds of nuance and delicate flavors.
The tiers I've found are basically: truly bad coffee; a very large range of coffees that pretty much all just taste like "alright coffee" and for me this goes as low as Kirkland-brand ground coffee and as high as... well, the "nicest" whole-bean coffee Costco sells, differentiated mostly by bitterness levels or burntness; and then the good stuff that doesn't even really belong in the same category of product as the rest, purchased in small quantities, very freshly roasted.
It could well be that Italy's espresso beans are much higher quality at the same price than those in the US. That's the case for some other things in other countries—rich ones, even, not just places with much lower GDP/capita (I still don't get why we can't seem to bake a good loaf of bread at a reasonable price, which also has the effect that our sandwiches tend to either suck or be really expensive—see also, cheese).
> and a scale to exactly portion out your coffee.
You're gonna want a scale if you do much cooking, anyway. Especially baking.